Arcade Fire, Neil Young Win Big at 40th Annual Juno Awards

For its 40th year, the Juno Awards took to Toronto's Air Canada Centre to hand out awards to Canadian artists. Hosted by Drake and featuring performances from Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Chromeo, Chilly Gonzales, Feist and many others, the televised awards show was definitely one of the best Junos broadcasts in recent years.

The big award on everyone's mind was certainly Album of the Year, which saw Drake, Hedley, Johnny Reid and Justin Bieber pitted against Grammy favourite Arcade Fire, who took the award. In fact, Arcade Fire ultimately cleaned up at the Junos, also taking the award for Group of the Year where they beat out Broken Social Scene, Down with Webster, Great Big Sea and Three Days Grace, as well as Songwriter of the Year.

Canadian musical legend Neil Young followed his pre-broadcast Juno for Adult Alternative Album of the Year with the less genre-specific Artist of the Year, beating out Drake, Justin Bieber, Johnny Reid and Sarah McLachlan.

Being that Dan Snaith is a long-running veteran of the Canadian electronic music scene with his Caribou project, it was a strange and perhaps misguided move to nominate him for Best New Artist. It didn't help, anyway, as Caribou lost the award to singer-songwriter Meaghan Smith.

Other awards handed out that evening included Pop Album of the Year (Justin Bieber's My World 2.0), Single of the Year (Young Artists for Haiti's "Wavin' Flag") and Juno Fan Choice Award (Justin Bieber).

As previously reported, the pre-broadcast Juno gala gave awards out to such artists as Arcade Fire (Alternative Album of the Year), Caribou (Electronic Album of the Year), Shad (Rap Recording of the Year), Said the Whale (New Group of the Year), Broken Social Scene (Recording Package of the Year), Fond of Tigers (Instrumental Album of the Year), Old Man Luedecke (Roots & Traditional Album of the Year) and Karkwa (Francophone Album of the Year).